


Boat (Black Sails Remix) Author: Kenaz ([info]kenazfictio

by kenaz



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Community: remix_redux, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-13
Updated: 2007-04-13
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:52:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Many thanks to Gloromeien  for the thoughtful and exacting beta!!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Boat (Black Sails Remix) Author: Kenaz ([info]kenazfictio

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Boat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/84572) by [kaydeefalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaydeefalls/pseuds/kaydeefalls). 



> Many thanks to Gloromeien for the thoughtful and exacting beta!!

Will Turner knows nothing about boats.

He stumbles on the deck, left foot first, tripping over the coiled lines. He's got no sea legs at all, not like his father and not like Jack. Jack sees bewilderment in his face as he looks about, doe-eyed and startled, trying to appear bold. He knows what Will sees: a keel and a hull and a deck and sails. A boat.

“Forgive him, lass," he whispers, fingering the rail, "he didn’t mean it.” The wood is smooth and polished beneath his hand. It shrugs him off disdainfully. If this were his _Pearl_, he thinks, she would rise to his touch.

No. No, she wouldn't: the _Pearl_'s a feisty, jealous bitch; she would know that Jack has been looking at young Will like a feast. She would make him pay for his inconstancy before she let him have his way with her. She’d gripe upwind so that her sails flogged, sulking sluggishly, and he would shorten her sheets and coax her out of her strop until she was herself again, dark and dingy and sparkling.

A _boat_. Jack snorts. Yet for all the lad’s high and mighty posing, he’s got enough brine in his blood to turn pirate for a pretty piece of quim. The lad sees a keel and a hull and a deck and sails... but that's only what a ship _needs_, not what it _is_. Now, what a ship is, is a gift: it can give a man the horizon. It can give a man the world. Will sees it only as a means to an end; he wants it to bring him the girl. But what is a girl when there is a world and a horizon, a sea and a ship?

“Not a boat, mate,” Jack whispers, and the lad almost jumps out of his skin, his hand instinctively clenching his sword-grip. Jack leans in closer. “A _ship_.”

Will shivers, and Jack knows that he can make him understand.

*

  
She handles stiffly, a prudish Naval matron laced down in heavy stays, all proper-like. She doesn't fancy Jack, but Jack is... persuasive. He talks to her when he takes the wheel, coerces her.

"You would carry on a mad tryst with this boat if you could figure out how."

Will's voice is stern, and he looks affronted. He doesn't understand ships, you see. Doesn't understand women, either, caught up as he is in rescuing his virginal Elizabeth. Virgins are a lark for deflowering, but not much use for anything else. Virgins aspire to be brides, and Jack has never cared much for entrapment. This ship is like a wife, severe and demanding, orderly and withholding. She obeys in the end because she is made for duty, and because he cajoles her, flatters her, murmurs flowery compliments to her in low tones.

Jack thinks of his _Pearl_, and how her decks swayed beneath him, bucked under his hands filthy and wanton, and he rocks to the memory of it, a motion that comes as much from within him as from the roll of the waves.

"Not _this_ boat. She's far too pretty for me. Too refined." She goes beam-on then, cutting smoothly and with purpose through the water, temporarily appeased. "No, mate," he says softly, so that Will must lean in to hear him, "I want a ship that's rough and dirty and knows her way around." Jack strokes a spoke of the wheel slowly, his hand moving obscenely up and down. The lacquer has worn away; the spoke is dry and warm and tapered in his palm. He parts his lips; his smile is a leer. "Savvy?"

Will blushes like the boy he is and invokes the name _Elizabeth_.

Jack thinks of a shipbuilder laying a silver coin beneath the mast to preserve his ship from storms. But Will’s eyes are following Jack's hands, and Jack knows it isn't embarrassment that flushes the lad's face when he makes his priggish protestation: it is understanding.

*

When the storm comes, Jack rides it hard. The brine is calling to his blood like a siren, and his blood answers: a fearsome throb climbing his veins hand over hand. He bares his teeth in a rictus and shouts a challenge into the gale: _Is this all you have for me? A sorry little trickle?_ Thunder reverberates its scathing reply, and lacerating rain blows in sideways to strike stripes across his face for the insult. The ship careens wildly. Beneath his feet, the slick planks swell and buck, living, breathing, sighing. He holds her steady as she pitches. Wood yields, groans.

He hears a sharp cry and sees Will knocked off his feet. The lad grabs for a loose line, misses, and is slammed hard against the rail. He slowly pulls himself up, and when he stands at last his eyes are wide and wild, his chest is heaving, his nostrils are flared. For a flickering, feral moment their eyes meet, glowing like St. Elmo’s fire while the sea rises up around them, hungry and vicious. Jack smiles a slow, dark smile.

Will knows now. He knows.

  


*

Rain and sweat and salt spray have teased Will’s hair into incipient elf-locks. The cords on his neck stand out tight as a bowline. The skin of his throat tastes like the sea.

"…Mad tryst…" he grunts. His head reclines and his shirt falls away. Jack tongues the meridian where a swordsmith’s pale flesh has become a pirate’s tanned hide and Will gasps, "Boat."

Jack has charted Will’s resistance like he charts the tides. He awaits the slack-water, and now feels the current turn. Will’s resistance is an ebb tide; it flows out of him and leaves a trail of flotsam-- coral bones and shells and secret treasure-- exposed along the strand, all for Jack’s taking. He is adrift, at the mercy of wind and water and Jack. They rock together, mouths hot and hands roaming, the planks of the deck rough beneath, the sky above as black and unfathomable as the deep. Jack’s world has shrunk to this: two bodies moving under coarse blankets. The horizon is the plain of Will’s chest, rising and falling with the ragged breath of a drowning man.

"Ship," Jack hisses. It is a curse, an oath, a charm.

Will is moaning now, the sound of sodden wood creaking, the sound of a ship in a gale. He is at sea, holding his course through Jack’s tempest, his voice a rasp of salt and spray.

“_Ship_.”

*

  
The sea is fickle: boats capsize, vessels overturn, even those with silver coins beneath their masts.

A ship in harbor, dark and dingy and sparkling, can be observed from a secluded place on shore, a tame and tranquil place, where the only clash is of hammer on anvil. The lad will look up from the blade that is emerging beneath his hands, and the heat from the forge and the brine from the quenching vat will have twisted his hair into elf-locks. He will taste salt on his lips and think of the sea. His body will rock to the memory of it, a motion that comes as much from within him as from the recollected roll of the waves. He will think of the storm and the surge and how he sailed. He will invoke the name _Elizabeth_. It is a prayer, an oath, an elegy.

But what is a girl when there is a world and a horizon, a sea and a ship?

Black sails unfurl in the harbor; the land looms behind, the horizon ahead: Jack sails.


End file.
